The present invention relates to disk drive carriers and disk drive bays for receiving such carriers. More specifically, the invention relates to carriers and bays for hot swappable disk drives, i.e., disk drives that may be removed from a computer assembly without having to power down the computer.
A computer system may use multiple disk drives to store large volumes of data. When such a system includes a redundant array of independent disks (xe2x80x9cRAIDxe2x80x9dxe2x80x94also sometimes called a redundant array of inexpensive disks), it may remain operational, even when a drive must be replaced. Disk drives that may be replaced without powering down the system are said to be xe2x80x9chot swappable.xe2x80x9d
Current RAID assemblies require relatively large enclosures to store high speed (e.g., 10K RPM or higher), high density, hot swappable disk drives. In addition, when such disk drives are used in such assemblies, rotational vibration interference (xe2x80x9cRVIxe2x80x9d) can adversely affect system performance, e.g., by slowing down data transmission from the drives.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved hot swap disk drive carrier and disk drive bay. There is a need for such a carrier and bay that reduces RVI, preferably such that RVI degrades performance by less than 1%. In addition, there is a need for such a storage assembly that enables a relatively low volume enclosure to store multiple disk drives. The hot swap disk drive carrier and disk drive bay of the present invention provides such an assembly.